The Format Wars: Is Peace a Good Thing?

[Peter Suderman] Greetings, Andrew Sullivan readers! Many
thanks to Andrew for inviting me to help look after his place while he’s gone
this week.

I should say up front that I’m a bit of a gear head, and also
a complete movie fanatic. That means that for the last few weeks, much of my
attention has been devoted to what appear to be the final moments in the high-def
format war. The good news for movie geeks is that the high-def format war
is all
but officially over. After a series
of developments in which all the news seemed to be bad for Toshiba and its HD
DVD format, the company has leaked
that, sometime early this week, it will officially announce that it’s ceasing
production of HD discs and players. This unequivocal
winner here is Sony’s Blu-ray format, which will now become the standard in
high def video. And it means that, for film and gadget nuts looking to upgrade to high definition home video, now’s the time.

But although peace may be a good thing, the end of a battle
doesn’t necessarily mean that the right side won. And in this case, a
triumphant Blu-ray regime may not actually be the optimal outcome for those of us on
the buying end. For one thing, the discs
and the equipment are more expensive. Increased demand may take care of some of the cost difference, but
prices are likely to remain higher for a longer period of time than they would
have had HD prevailed. For another, up until now, whenever Blu-ray and HD
released concurrent versions of the same title, the HD releases tended to have more
features, and many folks reported preferring the interactivity of
HD.

The biggest problem, thoughat least as far as I’m
concernedis that Blu-ray was released as an unfinished format. Early players aren’t able to play
all the features on newer discs (this has already resulted in some legal trouble
for Sony Samsung*), and players with the final hardware profile aren’t expected to hit
the market till late this year. So
although there are some clear benefits to Sony’s format (larger storage
capacity, multiple lossless audio tracks, ubiquity via the PS3), I’m not sure
the winner here was really the best.

On the other hand, I’m also currently researching Blu-ray
players with the intention of upgrading as soon as possible. To the victor go
the spoils.

*Corrected to say Samsung.

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